Have you ever paid attention to the Shrine's roof? If not, now's your time!
In this episode of Shrine Stories, you'll hear about a big change that was made to the roof in the '60s and why it was needed.
Listen as the Shrine's Education and Volunteer Manager Laura Carroll uncovers a story that's been hidden in plain sight.
Music
On this Day - Richard Smithson
Transcript
LAURA THOMAS: The Shrine of Remembrance embraces the diversity of our community and acknowledges the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast was recorded. We pay our respects to elders past and present,
LAURA CARROLL: But this is the only modification that they made which cost more. The rest of them are cost cutting measures. But they made it taller, I think, in response to criticisms from the public and the media and various interested parties that the building was too flat or too squat. Squat was the word that they used
LAURA THOMAS: Welcome to the Shrine Stories podcast, a series where we take you behind the scenes into the stories behind an object on our gallery floor. My name is Laura Thomas, and in this episode, we're going outside the galleries, or maybe I should say above the galleries. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the Shrine of Remembrance's roof, and joining me to share this unsuspecting story is Laura Carroll, the Shrine's Education and Volunteer Manager. Thanks for joining me, Laura.
LAURA CARROLL: Thanks for inviting me, Laura. And congratulations on having the best possible first name.
LAURA THOMAS: It's a good one, and it's not going to be confusing at all for the purposes of this podcast. Now, a little sneak peek behind the curtains of this podcast. The way it works is, I'll usually go to one of our Shrine staff members, ask them if they're interested in doing the podcast, and they'll have some idea of something they want to talk about. Now, in your case, Laura, I was quite surprised with your pitch, so I wanted to know straight off the bat, why did you want to talk about the Shrine's roof?
LAURA CARROLL: Yeah, that's a that's a fair question. I'm going to say because it's not part of the Shrine's collection as such, which is the place where you usually start from. So it goes back to the first year that I worked at the Shrine, which was 2016. I was on duty up in the sanctuary, and a visitor came in. I was relatively new to experiencing the kinds of moods that visitors bring to the Shrine of Remembrance, and this person made an enormous impression on me, Laura. He was a man who told me that he had been working on the roof applying the copper cover, which is there now, in 1970 in October 1970, and that he'd been up on the roof on the day that the Westgate bridge, a section collapsed, killing 35 workers and injuring many more, and that he'd heard it and seen it. And I mean, he didn't walk in and just say that, that came out in conversation, and he brought all of the emotion that came with recounting a story like that. He was he was deeply distressed, and that affected me very deeply as well. And in fact, I was so shaken by this story that I completely failed to find out his name or anything else about him, which I've regretted, because I would love to talk to him about about that. That just cemented for me, the important place of the Shrine in the history of Melbourne and and its role as a place that people feel that they can bring all kinds of dark and difficult experiences in their lives, and coming to the Sanctuary, and it's a place where they can process those experiences.
LAURA THOMAS: And it's clear he had a very obvious connection with the place, despite that awful experience that he had as well.
LAURA CARROLL: He did, it was, it was as I remember it. It was a very deeply meaningful place for him to visit on all kinds of levels, and that that memory of his was just part of it.
LAURA THOMAS: So your conversation with this gentleman takes us to talking about the roof itself. So we've stepped forward a little bit. Let's go back and talk about the roof that was originally in the Shrine.
LAURA CARROLL: Yeah. So the original plan for the roof was the same kind of structure, which I've learned an architect would call a truncated pyramidal dome. Like, technically, it's a dome. Even though it's kind of squared off on the sides and it wasn't as high as it ended up being built. They'd originally planned for it to be quite a bit flatter in profile, and that was the design that was accepted and won the competition.
LAURA THOMAS: So it was similar to what it looks like now, but a lot shorter?
LAURA CARROLL: Shorter, without the element on the top, which we call the Symbol of Glory. And it's a sort of a tuft on the top, if I can call it that. And also it was clad in Granite, the same as the rest of the building.
LAURA THOMAS: Right, so why was it made taller than the original design?
LAURA CARROLL: Yeah, that's really interesting. It was made taller than the original design that- they made a lot of modifications to the original design between the competition being judged and starting construction. But this is the only modification that they made which cost more. The rest of them are cost cutting measures. But they made it taller, I think, in response to criticisms from the public and the media and various interested parties that the building was too flat or too squat. 'Squat' was the word that they used. So by increasing the roof profile and adding the element on the top, they added three and a half metres to the height of the building.
LAURA THOMAS: It's quite significant.
LAURA CARROLL: It is
LAURA THOMAS: And a lot less squat, as they would say,
LAURA CARROLL: Yeah, yeah. When you go into the Sanctuary and you look up at the roof on if you imagine it being, you know, essentially the height of a large room, shorter than what it is now, it would be like a significantly different experience to being inside the building as well as to look at it from the outside.
LAURA THOMAS: It's always interesting with these kind of things, I think we take it as it's it's what it's always been, and it's hard to imagine it being any different
LAURA CARROLL: Exactly
LAURA THOMAS: To what it is now, but the original roof beyond the height was also changed. You mentioned it was originally granite, and I have to be totally transparent in this, I instinctively knew that the roof wasn't granite, but I never thought to stop and ask why. So this is where you're going to come in, Laura and tell us all why, because the story is quite fascinating.
LAURA CARROLL: Yeah, I think I was just the same having seen lots of the beautiful aerial photographs of the Domain on the day that the Shrine was dedicated in 1934 the building is gleaming white, that beautiful, silvery Tynong granite. The entire structure was made of that stone, and it still is underneath that cap, but it didn't stay white like that for long. You can see from photographs taken in the 1940s and 1950s it acquired a kind of a watery stain, possibly quite red, and it being the roof, it was susceptible to leaking. And by about 1967 the water seepage problem that they had at that time was becoming unmanageable. The Trustee minutes record things like water running down the walls of the ambulatory, and I think it was also, there was water pooling on the floor of the Sanctuary on some days. And so the Trustees knew that they had to do something to seal the central core of the building against rain.
LAURA THOMAS: So what were some of the options that were thrown up? What do they think they could do?
LAURA CARROLL: Yeah, it's interesting. They didn't decide straight away to cover the roof. The very first thing that that they did was they approached the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was, is now, I think, the Department of Infrastructure, and sought advice about how they could seal the joints between the stone. And the Board of Works referred them to the CSIRO. I think that they all thought that the CSIRO would provide them with a miracle ceiling compound that would deal with their problem, but that avenue of inquiry led to nothing, and one way or another, I'm guessing, but possibly through, I suppose, networks and social connections, they found their way to one of the highest profile architects working in Victoria at that time in the late '60s, Sir Roy Grounds, whose name will be familiar to many Victorians as the designer of the National Gallery NGV International in St Kilda Road, which was finished and opened to the public in 1969.
LAURA CARROLL: And so Roy Grounds came and visited the Shrine, made a number of recommendations for work that they should do to protect it against water coming in. And the first thing that he said that they should do was to make a copper cover for the roof, just the same as on a domestic roof, where there's sort of soldered together, folded bits of metal at the point where water runs. I think it's called flashing that, that that part of a roof. So he recommended that they do that. And I think that possibly he might be seen as a sort of a strange choice of an architect to advise on what's essentially a maintenance issue for an established building. But Grounds had been involved in the setting up of the Pioneer Museum, the outdoor museum at Swan Hill, which many people will have visited, which had a lot of heritage buildings in it, and he was very interested in conserving heritage architecture. He probably also would have, well, he also would have known about the way that the State Library's dome was repaired against the same issue, water coming in. It also had a copper cover put on it. And so when I was a young student and working in the State Library, it was very dark in the reading room because there was no skylight. It was just covered in copper.
LAURA THOMAS: Wow. Was there any opposition to this change?
LAURA CARROLL: There was no opposition to this change to the appearance of the building that I can uncover, and I've had a look in newspapers of the time, and certainly the Trustees didn't think that it was an issue. He said to them that it wouldn't substantially change the appearance of the building, which I think tells us something about the different ways that people have viewed the Shrine over time, and what perhaps we might consider to be a substantial change to the appearance of a heritage building now, because, of course, it made a huge difference to the appearance of the building.
LAURA THOMAS: Yeah and as I said earlier, it's not something that I've consciously noticed, but ever since hearing about this, you can date the photos of Melbourne based on the roof of the Shrine.
LAURA CARROLL: That's absolutely right, Laura. In fact, one of the, this is one of the first things that got me thinking about the roof. I was looking at one of the Facebook groups that I'm in that's to do with the heritage of the city, where people share old photographs. And there was a photo, like an aerial photograph of Melbourne, and the group members were speculating on when it had been taken, and because it didn't have the copper roof on it, I knew that it was before 1969. The roof, the copper roof, went on in late 1969.
LAURA THOMAS: What was that process like of constructing it and putting it on the Shrine? How long did that take?
LAURA CARROLL: Probably didn't take very long, probably just a few months. Not entirely sure. To be honest, our records don't really indicate
LAURA THOMAS: And how much did it cost to do?
LAURA CARROLL: It wasn't cheap. Copper is an expensive material, and I imagine that the labour was highly skilled. It cost around $30,000 that's equivalent to $412,000 in today's purchasing power. I also had a look at some house, some real estate ads from the 1960s and it would have bought you a really nice house in Ivanhoe.
LAURA THOMAS: So even then and today, a very expensive undertaking. But how has the roof been since?
LAURA CARROLL: The roof has been amazing since. It did exactly what it was designed to do. It put a watertight seal on the central core of the building. So as far as I can tell, the area that it covers, which is essentially the Sanctuary, has never leaked since then. There was a major project to waterproof the building and future proof it essentially taken place in the 1990s and that work concentrated on the area that's covered by the ambulatory and the outer terraces. So I don't think that they needed to do the kind of maintenance and and work to the roof that they've had to do to the rest of the structure. And our colleagues here at the Shrine who take care of the fabric of the building, tell me that they are certain that there has not needed, it's not needed maintenance.
LAURA THOMAS: And Laura, you mentioned that Roy Ground said, when pitching his idea that it wouldn't substantially change the building, the aesthetic of the building, the look of the building. It has. There's no denying that, to go from a white roof to a darker roof. Do you think if it had been left and a decision had to be made today, that we'd come up with the same solution? What do you hypothesise about that?
LAURA CARROLL: Yeah. Now not, not as an as an architect or a heritage specialist in any way, just as someone who's interested in this question. I'd be astonished if a change like that was permitted to be made to a building of the heritage significance of the Shrine of Remembrance. So that decision was made at a time when what we now take for granted as heritage protections were just beginning to be put in place. So the Shrine of Remembrance did not receive heritage classification until the 1990s. I was astonished when I-
LAURA THOMAS: That feels late
LAURA CARROLL: It does. And I think that that tells us something really important about the Shrine, and that it is that for most of the 20th century, it was not seen as a heritage building. It was a new, a relatively new building in the in the city's collective memory, and it was also extremely highly valued by the community from the moment that it was opened. And so it was never seen as something that needed protection in the way that perhaps something like the Queen Victorian Markets might have been demolished in the 1960s because maybe people thought supermarkets were better to have than an open air market. The Shrine's never been vulnerable in that way. So it didn't need heritage protection. It wasn't seen as needing heritage protection. The Trustees did obtain the consent of the State Government to do the copper roof, but I think that that was more to do with funding it, rather than making that change to the appearance of the building.
LAURA THOMAS: And we heard Laura at the start of this episode, why you chose to tell this story and your interest in it. But what do you hope that listeners take away when hearing this story in particular,
LAURA CARROLL: I think that, as you mentioned, it's something that we, all of us who are alive today, really, remember as being part of the building for all the time that we've known it. And I just think it's kind of mind expanding to look at a building that you know very well and imagine how it might have been, how it was different when it was first constructed, and also the brave steps that people have made over time to preserve it for future generations.
LAURA THOMAS: So next time you're walking your dog or coming past the Shrine, have a look at the roof and notice it and see that there's a really interesting story behind it. Thank you so much, Laura for sharing that with us today.
LAURA CARROLL: Thanks for having me.
LAURA THOMAS: Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast. For more, make sure you subscribe to our channel, wherever you listen. To visit the Shrine in person, or to come along to one of our events, just head to shrine.org.au.
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